In this post Ian Lock muses about some of the choices we make that have our lives be more, or less extraordinary.

When you look back on your life what do you see? Is it a life full of extraordinary events that that helped you to feel truly alive or is it a series of ‘if onlys’? For me it’s somewhere in between. I have a job that takes up much of my time and I have a family who I love. Both of these are full time occupations and I notice that the day to day managing of my life can have some Extraordinary plans slip under the radar.

About a year ago a good friend of mine suggested that we stop buying each other Christmas and birthday presents and instead use the money to plan a weekend away once a year to do the things we’d always wanted to do. This was a great suggestion because we used to do loads together and life has just got in the way of that over the last 10 years or so. For our first trip we decided to go to the Le Mans 24 hour race in June this year. The time came to make the commitment and I noticed how I started to think about work, cost and time away from my family. Maybe this year wasn’t the best time to do this, maybe it will be easier in a few years time, why don’t we do something closer to home – in effect, why don’t we make the dream smaller, easier to achieve and a lot less extraordinary. As we kicked this around others who we’d invited started to drop out as well sighting time and cost as their reasons. It suddenly struck me that the time to do this was now. Yes, we might do it instead in a few years time but anything could happen and maybe we wouldn’t or even couldn’t.

My habit is usually to put myself at the end of the queue when it comes to doing what I want to. This maybe true for others too. I’m happy with that most of the time and it does get in the way when I really want to do something. The end result of this is that I don’t feed my soul as often as I would like.

So yesterday became a good day. I booked the package to Le Mans with two friends and we’re heading off in June for a weekend of racing heaven. We’ve made it even more extraordinary by booking a camping pitch right on the famous Porsche curves where the cars are approaching at some of the fastest speeds, where we can go to sleep with sound of engines popping on the overrun and the smell of petrol in the warm June air. This may not be your cup of tea and for us it’s a truly extraordinary weekend.

It feels great to have booked this up and I can’t wait for June. It’s had me think about what else I can do in other areas of my life to plan some extraordinary events. I also give fair warning that some posts in June might well include stories and pictures from Le Mans!